Epilogue: Tuesday
A few months later, I was in the same grocery store. Tuesday, again. Cereal aisle.
A woman was kneeling on the floor near the end cap, re-tying the shoe of a child who had gotten impatient with a loose lace. The child — maybe five, maybe six — was holding a box of crackers and looking around with the wandering attention of someone who had places to be. An ordinary scene. The most ordinary thing in the world.
Except that I noticed, because now I noticed, how the child watched the room. How her eyes moved from face to face, reading them, the way you read a room when you couldn’t read the sound of it. How she catalogued quickly, accurately, with an efficiency that adults had largely lost.
She caught me looking. She looked back, unafraid, direct.
I smiled.
She considered this for a moment.
Then she smiled back, decisive, and returned to the important question of the cracker box.
Her mother finished the lace and they moved on, and the store went back to its Tuesday hum, and I stood there for a moment with my basket of cereal and coffee and bananas, and I thought about all the things that happened in ordinary hours, in ordinary places, between people whose whole story you would never know.
Then I went to find the pasta sauce.
